Lead Technical Animator - League Of Legends

Job Description

Established in 2020, the Singapore Studio is Riot's second international game development studio. Working together with our Hong Kong Studio, Riot has been expanding our footprint in Asia and accelerating our talent growth to develop games that deliver great experiences to our players. Our mission is to ''scale Riot's games to hyper-serve players.''

We partner with our LA headquarters on game development for League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, and Legends of Runeterra. We're also building teams for VALORANT and Project L, our take on a fighting game. The Singapore Studio is seeking talented, passionate Rioters with backgrounds in all areas of game development to build games that make it better to be a player.

We're focused on working together to promote individual autonomy, ownership, collaboration, and inclusivity, so every Rioter can be their best while we boldly pursue games.

That's where you come in

As Lead Technical Animator on the League of Legends (LoL) team, you will work closely with the Technical Animation team to architect, innovate, and uphold the technical quality of the project's rigging pipeline. Together with a team of (6-12) Technical Animators, the focus of your team will be to enable, unlock and empower our animation teams by designing and building rigs, tools, pipeline, and technical processes.

You will report to our Senior Manager, Technical Art.

Responsibilities
• Lead, mentor, and grow the technical animators in our partner studio in Shanghai working on League of Legends & Teamfight Tactics (TFT)
• Develop and grow their rigging skills through mentoring, training and feedback
• Ensure they're properly informed and have all the documentation they need to succeed
• Make sure the tech animation content they deliver meets/exceeds the quality bar for LoL
• Source & hire AAA tech animation talent in China
• Be the bridge for the tech animation discipline between Riot and our partner studio in Shanghai & Establish working processes, workflow and ritual for the team
• Coordinate with other Rioters in our Hong Kong & Singapore (HKSG) studio to make sure product goals are fulfilled and working practices are appropriate
• Uncover and communicate Riot's tribal knowledge pertaining to tech, product, and process
• Be the rigging Subject Matter Expert (SME) of League Skins and Little Legends in the HKSG studio.
• Drive animation collaboration between our LA and HKSG studio
• Own animation tools and process, and facilitate and improve to accelerate animation production
• Unlock products and content that would have otherwise been blocked by technical animation
• Ensure the technical integrity of all content produced by the animation team is perfect
• Form a good, trust based relationship with discipline peers in LA to enable support and knowledge sharing

Required Qualifications
• Expert Technical Animation experience, having designed and implemented pipeline, workflow, and process improvements for animation content production for games, including tools development.
• Experience in a (formal or non-formal) Lead/Senior role, having mentored and guided a team
• Growth minded and motivated towards teaching, enabling, growing rather than doing
• Experience rigging characters
• Experience translating artistic requirements into sustainable workflow designs
• Experience with 3d software such as Maya, game engines, and scripting in Python
• A strong communicator and able to convey abstract/sophisticated ideas in a concise way, in English or in Chinese
• Experience working on video games.

Desired Qualifications
• Experience with 3D Math, rendering, graphics programming, lighting, and shading HLSL
• Experience with the technical requirements for a variety of game platforms
• Bonus points for:
• Proficiency in Mandarin language
• Working on content heavy pipelines
• Working on live service games
• Working on games which are content heavy
• Exposure to procedural content generation & machine learning for content creation

For this role, you'll find success through craft expertise, a collaborative spirit, and decision-making that prioritizes the delight of players. We will be looking at your past studies, experience, and your personal relationship with games. If you embody player empathy and care about the experience of players, this could be the role for you!
Our Perks:
• Full relocation support
• Full health insurance for you, your spouse and children
• Open paid time off
• Retirement benefits with company matching
• Life insurance, parental leave, plus short-term and long-term disability
• Play Fund so you can broaden and deepen your knowledge of our players and community through games
• We will double down on your donations of time and money to non-profits

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-d88wk6-18-221-41-214-42 in your application.